Hail to the Tribe of Chiefs

Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Howard Schultz, Amy Klobuchar or Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg? Who are these people? They all want to be your President. Others testing the waters – or are jumping right in – are Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, some are pushing Oprah Winfrey (estimated worth $3.1billion). Michael Bloomberg ($51.8 billion) is playing coy, again. Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been mentioned. Hillary Clinton is pushing, uh, Hillary Clinton. What’s left to say about Bernie Sanders who is already on the campaign trail? Beto O’Rourke is wandering around the countryside, unshaven and tweeting. These are just some of the Democratic possible presidential candidates, and it’s still early in the week. On the other side of the ballot, President Donald Trump may have a couple of opponents in the Republican primaries. Ted Cruz is lying – OK, bad choice of words – in the weeds, ready to pounce.

Didn’t we just have a presidential election, but the next one is less than two years away and the Iowa caucuses are a little over a year away. Assuming you are not going to vote for Trump again and are now on your meds, there are a bunch of Dem candidates to choose from: one is married to a British national, one married his husband, two Rhodes scholars, two or maybe three Jews, at least two Catholics, a Hispanic, several women including one African-American, or two if Oprah runs. So let’s look at some of those whose hats, or bonnets, may be thrown in the ring. In no particular order:

Sen. Kamala Harris, from California. I’d never heard of Harris, had you? But remember that when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton announced they were running for president, each had a national recognition factor of like 2 and 3 percent. No wonder they weren’t elected. Rush Limbaugh says the right is “scared to death of Kamala Harris.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand from New York. She announced her candidacy on Stephen Colbert’s show. Gillibrand’s husband is Jonathan Gillibrand, a British national. The Gillibrands had their second son in 2008, and she continued to work until the day of the baby’s delivery. In 2014, Gillibrand was named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Occasional Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. He made a fortune selling Americans a cup of coffee for $7 – and in a paper cup. Trump tweeted: “Howard Schultz doesn’t have the ‘guts’ to run for President!” Schultz replied: The president is “stuck on stupid.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. University of Houston, Rutgers School of Law-Newark. Warren taught at several law schools, including UH and The University of Texas. Wonder what her former students think about her. Warren would be 71 by the time of the next election, but she is three years younger than Trump.

Julian Castro is an identical twin. They could make two campaign speeches at once. Castro is the only candidate who needs an accent mark over his name (over the a in Julian).

Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg. Glad he is not a write-in candidate. Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar, and a veteran of the War in Afghanistan. He is the first openly gay municipal executive in Indiana. Married to Chasten Glezman. In 2014, The Washington Post called Buttigieg “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Stanford University (where he played tight end), Rhodes Scholar at The Queen’s College, Oxford. As mayor of Newark, he worked to clean up street gangs, who then tried to have him assassinated. He is a career politician, but has an estimated net worth of $3 million. He must have followed the LBJ School of Politicians Getting Rich.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. Yale grad. Her father was a newspaper columnist (Yeah!) who had a bad drinking problem. (So?) At the end of the 114th Congress, Klobuchar had passed more legislation than any other senator. Former Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale said, “She has done better in that miserable Senate than most people there.” Justin Bieber declared Klobuchar should be “locked up” for sponsoring a bill making profiting from illegal streaming of copyrighted content a felony, but Bieber, like Cruz, is a Canadian, so who cares? Klobuchar declared that tomato paste in pizza sauce makes the pizza qualify as a vegetable in federal school lunch programs. A company based in Minnesota is one of the country’s biggest producers of frozen pizza.

Beto O’Rourke. former Congressman from El Paso, raised a record $80 million in his campaign for U.S. Senator from Texas, the darling of progressive media, but anyone who loses to Ted Cruz, the most disliked person in Washington, may have trouble raising that sum again. New U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (the guy with the eyepatch) calls O’Rourke “weird.” Running for president would follow a long line of Texans beginning with Jack Garner. Since then we have had Phil Gramm, Lloyd Bentsen, John Connally and Ross Perot. (The Bushes are different.) The only Texans to get to the Oval Office were Eisenhower and LBJ.

Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the fifth of nine children. He stated he is of Italian, French, German, British, and African-American heritage. Once lieutenant governor of Louisiana. He is the son of former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu and brother of former U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. As mayor, he removed the city’s Confederate statues. In 2010, he won 365 of the city’s 366 voting precincts. Knowing what we know about Louisiana politics, we must wonder what happened to that lone precinct.

Former Veep Joe Biden will be 78 in 2020. Twice he ran for president. No luck. Recently Biden collected $200,000 to address a Republican-leaning audience in Michigan. He praised a local GOP candidate, who won by four and a half percentage points, but that soured him with a lot of Dems.

Who’s the best candidate for U.S. President? Let’s ask Vladimir Putin.